CHAPTER VII.
Madame Sand—Lelia—Visit to Majorca—Exclusive Ideals.
In 1836 Madame Sand had not only published INDIANA, VALENTINE, and JACQUES, but also LELIA, that prose poem of which she afterwards said: "If I regret having written it, it is because I could not now write it. Were I in the same state of mind now as when it was written, it would indeed be a great consolation to me to be able to commence it." The mere painting of romances in cold water colors must have seemed, without doubt, dull to Madame Sand, after having handled the hammer and chisel of the sculptor so boldly, in modeling the grand lines of that semi-colossal statue, in cutting those sinewy muscles, which even in their statuesque immobility, are full of bewildering and seductive charm. Should we continue long to gaze upon it, it excites the most painful emotion. In strong contrast to the miracle of Pygmalion, Lelia seems a living Galatea, rich in feeling, full of love, whom the deeply enamored artist has tried to bury alive in his exquisitely sculptured marble, stifling the palpitating breath, and congealing the warm blood in the vain hope of elevating and immortalizing the beauty he adores. In the presence of this vivid nature petrified by art, we cannot feel that admiration is kindled into love, but, saddened and chilled, we are forced to acknowledge that love may be frozen into mere admiration.
Brown and olive-hued Lelia! Dark as Lara, despairing as Manfred, rebellious as Cain, thou hast ranged through the depths of solitude! But thou art more ferocious, more savage, more inconsolable than they, because thou hast never found a man's heart sufficiently feminine to love thee as they were loved, to pay the homage of a confiding and blind submission to thy virile charms, to offer thee a mute yet ardent devotion, to suffer its obedience to be protected by thy Amazonian force! Woman-hero! Like the Amazons, thou hast been valiant and eager for combats; like them thou hast not feared to expose the exquisite loveliness of thy face to the fierceness of the summer's sun, or the sharp blasts of winter! Thou hast hardened thy fragile limbs by the endurance of fatigue, thus robbing them of the subtle power of their weakness! Thou hast covered thy palpitating breast with a heavy cuirass, which has pressed and torn it, dyeing its snow in blood;—that gentle woman's bosom, charming as life, discreet as the grave, which is always adored by man when his heart is permitted to form its sole, its impenetrable buckler!
After having blunted her chisel in polishing this statue, which, by its majesty, its haughty disdain, its look of hopeless anguish, shadowed by the frowning of the pure brows and by the long loose locks shivering with electric life, reminds us of those antique cameos on which we still admire the perfect features, the beautiful yet fatal brow, the haughty smile of the Medusa, whose gaze paralyzed and stopped the pulses of the human heart;—Madame Sand in vain sought another form for the expression of the emotions which tortured her insatiate soul. After having draped this figure with the highest art, accumulating every species of masculine greatness upon it in order to compensate for the highest of all qualities which she repudiated for it, the grandeur of, "utter self-abnegation for love," which the many-sided poet has placed in the empyrean and called "the Eternal Feminine," (DAS EWIGWEIBLICHE,)—a greatness which is love existing before any of its joys, surviving all its sorrows;—after having caused Don Juan to be cursed, and a divine hymn to be chanted to Desire by Lelia, who, as well as Don Juan, had repulsed the only delight which crowns desire, the luxury of self-abnegation,—after having fully revenged Elvira by the creation of Stenio,—after having scorned man more than Don Juan had degraded woman,—Madame Sand, in her LETTRES D'UN VOYAGEUR, depicts the shivering palsy, the painful lethargy which seizes the artist, when, having incorporated the emotion which inspired him in his work, his imagination still remains under the domination of the insatiate idea without being able to find another form in which to incarnate it. Such poetic sufferings were well understood by Byron, when he makes Tasso shed his most bitter tears, not for his chains, not for his physical sufferings, not for the ignominy heaped upon him, but for his finished Epic, for the ideal world created by his thought and now about to close its doors upon him, and by thus expelling him from its enchanted realm, rendering him at last sensible of the gloomy realities around him:—
"But this is o'er—my pleasant task is done:—
My long-sustaining friend of many years:
If I do blot thy final page with tears,
Know that my sorrows have wrung from me none.
But thou, my young creation! my soul's child!
Which ever playing round me came and smiled,
And woo'd me from myself with thy sweet sight,
Thou too art gone—and so is my delight."
LAMENT OF TASSO.—BYRON.
At this epoch, Madame Sand often heard a musician, one of the friends who had greeted Chopin with the most enthusiastic joy upon his arrival at Paris, speak of him. She heard him praise his poetic genius even more than his artistic talent. She was acquainted with his compositions, and admired their graceful tenderness. She was struck by the amount of emotion displayed in his poems, with the effusions of a heart so noble and dignified. Some of the countrymen of Chopin spoke to her of the women of their country, with the enthusiasm natural to them upon that subject, an enthusiasm then very much increased by a remembrance of the sublime sacrifices made by them during the last war. Through their recitals and the poetic inspiration of the Polish artist, she perceived an ideal of love which took the form of worship for woman. She thought that guaranteed from dependence, preserved from inferiority, her role might be like the fairy power of the Peri, that ethereal intelligence and friend of man. Perhaps she did not fully understand what innumerable links of suffering, of silence, of patience, of gentleness, of indulgence, of courageous perseverance, had been necessary for the formation of the worship for this imperious but resigned ideal, beautiful indeed, but sad to behold, like those plants with the rose-colored corollas, whose stems, intertwining and interlacing in a network of long and numerous branches, give life to ruins; destined ever to embellish decay, growing upon old walls and hiding only tottering stones! Beautiful veils woven by beneficent Nature, in her ingenious and inexhaustible richness, to cover the constant decay of human things!
As Madame Sand perceived that this artist, in place of giving body to his phantasy in porphyry and marble, or defining his thoughts by the creation of massive caryatides, rather effaced the contour of his works, and, had it been necessary, could have elevated his architecture itself from the soil, to suspend it, like the floating palaces of the Fata Morgana, in the fleecy clouds, through his aerial forms of almost impalpable buoyancy, she was more and more attracted by that mystic ideal which she perceived glowing within them. Though her arm was powerful enough to have sculptured the round shield, her hand was delicate enough to have traced those light relievos where the shadows of ineffaceable profiles have been thrown upon and trusted to a stone scarcely raised from its level plane. She was no stranger in the supernatural world, she to whom Nature, as to a favored child, had unloosed her girdle and unveiled all the caprices, the attractions, the delights, which she can lend to beauty. She was not ignorant of the lightest graces; she whose eye could embrace such vast proportions, had stooped to study the glowing illuminations painted upon the wings of the fragile butterfly. She had traced the symmetrical and marvellous network which the fern extends as a canopy over the wood strawberry; she had listened to the murmuring of streams through the long reeds and stems of the water-grass, where the hissing of the "amorous viper" may be heard; she had followed the wild leaps of the Will-with-a-wisp as it bounds over the surface of the meadows and marshes; she had pictured to herself the chimerical dwelling-places toward which it perfidiously attracts the benighted traveller; she had listened to the concerts given by the Cicada and their friends in the stubble of the fields; she had learned the names of the inhabitants of the winged republics of the woods which she could distinguish as well by their plumaged robes, as by their jeering roulades or plaintive cries. She knew the secret tenderness of the lily in the splendor of its tints; she had listened to the sighs of Genevieve, [Footnote: ANDRE] the maiden enamored of flowers.
She was visited in her dreams by those "unknown friends" who came to rejoin her "when she was seized with distress upon a desolate shore," brought by a "rapid stream... in large and full bark"... upon which she mounted to leave the unknown shores, "the country of chimeras which make real life appear like a dream half effaced to those, who enamored from their infancy of large shells of pearl, mount them to land in those isles where all are young and beautiful... where the men and women are crowned with flowers, with their long locks floating upon their shoulders... holding vases and harps of a strange form... having songs and voices not of this world... all loving each other equally with a divine love... where crystal fountains of perfumed waters play in basins of silver... where blue roses bloom in vases of alabaster... where the perspectives are all enchanted... where they walk with naked feet upon the thick green moss, soft as carpets of velvet... where all sing as they wander among the fragrant groves." [Footnote: LETTRES D'UN VOYAGEUR]